Sarah Mäkelä's Blog, page 47

Website updated!

After submitting my updates to my awesome webmistress, Rae Monet, my website has now been updated! It had definitely been a while since I'd had it updated, especially since I haven't had much news in terms of new contracts, but I hope those will come soon! As noted, my novel Melody of Love has been no longer available for a while since Firedrakes Weyr went out of business toward the end of last year. It received some great reviews, but I'm interested more in the paranormal romance and urban f...

Just finished reading...

Between Light and Dark by Elissa Wilds.

I've had the book for a while now and picked it up randomly a little earlier this month from my bookshelf to work on my goal to read more this year. I didn't have many expectations going into it, but I attended a workshop by the author during my time at Tampa Area Romance Authors, which was very informative and awesome. The workshop was about different aspects of the paranormal and Wicca, I think. This book impliments those things in a very interesting w...

Editing again

Crawling out of my blogging hole again to say hello and update. I've been working on my urban fantasy novel that I finished in 2008 and revised the first draft last year. It needs to go through another draft, so I'm taking charge and getting it taken care of at the beginning of the year. Then I'll be able to work on sending it out to agents throughout the rest of the year. Woo! I sent it to a few last year, and that's one of the reasons for the third draft.

After finishing my most recent novel...

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I hope it's everything you'd wish for. I know that I'm feeling optimistic about the year ahead. =) Last night, I finished the novel I'd been working on in November and December. And I watched the movie The Hangover, which was so hilarious. It was a great ending to the year.

Character research

As I'm writing my work-in-progress, I still do character research. Sometimes this comes at interesting times like when I'm watching a movie. My family watched G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra the other night, and the person who played Captain Duke (Channing Tatum) really struck me as a great actor, but it made me think of my hero as well. Thus spurring some Googling, and ta-da, I have a little better grasp of my hero.

Images and the way people act and react are something I love watching, so movies ...

Reasonable word count goal = Win

I've been keeping with my word count goals, and writing at least 1k each day. I had initially came down from doing National Novel Writing Month thinking that I would write 3,000 words per day, but I quickly found out that is not a good day-to-day pace for me. Somehow November has a magical way of pulling very high word counts from me, but outside of November, my pace is not as hasty, which probably is a good thing. So, I'd said to myself, I'll do 2,000 words a day, but still I couldn't quite ...

Nano follow-up and The Warrior Writer

As my neat little widget says, I managed to beat National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) last month. It was pretty dang close, too. I slacked off toward the middle of the month and ended up having to do a few intense, high word count days. Thankfully, I didn't mess myself up too much by slacking. I think the high word count days helped me to get a renewed "ummph" toward the novel though. Woo! I've recovered from the push of Nano and now I'm going at a slower steadier pace of at least 1k word...

Nano update

Wow, this month has been flying by pretty quickly. I'm at 18,349 words for the evening, so that's exciting. The novel has been coming relatively painlessly. This year, I'm pantsing (writing without an outline). I had a general idea of the characters and a few scenes, but that was it. Usually, I prefer to have at least a general outline when I write, especially when doing National Novel Writing since it's got a pretty brisk pace, but sometimes it's fun to just let the characters lead and direc...

Nano begins!

Once again, it's been quite a while since I've posted a blog. Yikes. And it's been something of a year since the last blog I did. Today was the beginning of National Novel Writing Month! Hooray!

Up until last night, I didn't really have any idea what I'd be writing about, but as I got myself in my chair started, things started flowing. The novel I'm working on was inspired by a short story I wrote back in college that I'd always wanted to turn into a novel. Now it's finally getting its chance...

RT convention

It's been a while since I've blogged here. Too long! Wow... A while back, I posted that I'd be attending Romantic Times convention in Orlando, FL. This week (Tuesday-Sunday) was it. There's so many things that happened, and just the fact that it was my first convention (related to writing) I'd ever been to, I was a little overwhelmed. After a day or two, I started coming down from being so wide-eyed by all of the people and events.

I went to some great workshop/panels on Urban Fantasy and the var